26A – Celebrating Failure

I have failed multiple times while cooking this semester. It might not sound like a big deal, but I do think of myself as pretty good at cooking so when I mess up a dish or improperly cook something it resonates with me as being a failure. The two times that stick out for me when I failed at cooking was when I messed up a soup and when I did not cook potatoes fully.

The soup was going to be a cheesy and creamy soup with diced chicken, onion, carrot, and pasta. I had everything done by scratch and ready for the milk and cheese to go in. My first mistake was getting low moisture cheese which is harder to make melt. So, I added in the milk and then finally the cheese. The second mistake I made was having the temperature too high causing the already hard to melt cheese to start clumping. The fats had been boiled out of the cheese which then made the cheese into a rubbery sticky consistency. All these mistakes turned into a failure that I learned from.

The potatoe situation was a different failure this semester. Firstly, I had chopped the potatoes into a dice so that they would be easier and quicker to cook. However, I made a rookie mistake and tried to put way too much of the potatoes in the pan with onions and chopped bacon. I thought the bacon would cook down while the potatoes were cooking, and the onions would caramelize while all at the same time. Next mistake was putting paprika as one of the spices on it all making the not cooked potatoes have color. Which if you know how to cook things, you know that color means cooking. So, the combination of darkening the potatoes with paprika and the over filling of the pan made most of the potatoes not fully cooked by the time the main part of the dinner was done being made.

I have learned to not get low moisture cheese for soups, or if you do use it you need the right temperature and enough acidic elements in the soup to keep the cheese from clumping. I have also learned to not fill the pan up with a lot of something and the color should be a dark brown for potatoes not just slightly brown from spices.

I think failure is the only way we learn because if we never failed then we would go on with our day doing things that we never knew fully about. I think I handle failure emotionally and behaviorally in the sense that I become persistent in trying to fix a failure and do not like when people tell me to let a failure go because I want to learn how to fix it and better myself and change. I don’t think I am more likely to take a risk because of this class but I do feel like I can understand those risks better now that I have learned about changing and evolving one self or a product.